“Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks & the Hidden Powers of the Mind” by Alex Stone

“My mind,” Harry Houdini liked to say, “is the key which sets me free.” The remark was typical of him, at once arrogant and enigmatic, giving nothing away even as it encapsulated his belief in an unknown power of the brain that he alone possessed.

The legendary escape artist would likely have been intrigued by magician Alex Stone’s absorbing if uneven new book, “Fooling Houdini.” Though he would have been affronted by the title — it refers to a famous episode in which he was baffled by numerous repetitions of a card trick — Houdini would surely have admired the scientific rigor that Stone brings to the elusive art of magic.

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(Harper) - ‘Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind’ by Alex Stone

Stone, a “high-functioning magicaholic” who holds a master’s degree in physics, sets out to explore the world of conjurers and cardsharps through the lens of neuroscience, psychology and advanced mathematics. “Magic, at its core, is about toying with the limits of perception,” he writes. “And as any neuroscientist will tell you, one can learn a lot about the brain by studying those bizarre moments wherein it succumbs to illusion. Magic lives in these moments.”

The book begins with an account of Stone’s quixotic attempt to make a name for himself at the 2006 World Championship of Magic in Stockholm, the magic community’s equivalent of the Olympics. Overmatched and underprepared, Stone commits a series of technical gaffes and suffers an embarrassing disqualification. “There are many ways to lose,” he tells us, “but nothing compares to the disgrace of being red-lighted in the middle of your act. . . . I hadn’t just lost; I’d been humiliated.”

Humbled, Stone sets off on a path of deeper immersion in the craft and culture of magic. Back home in New York, he falls in with “an underground community of like-minded obsessives” and becomes an apprentice to various Yoda-like masters, including a blind card manipulator whose “caliper-like fingers,” able to “sense the thickness of paper stock to within a thousandth of an inch,” won him a job as a “Touch Analyst” for a playing card manufacturer. Soon, Stone is doing “Finger Fitness” exercises to whip his hands into shape for tricky sleights and manipulations. “Next to the brain,” he says, “the hand is the most important evolutionary adaptation in human history, our main interface with the world.”

Though Stone’s rigorous training comes at the expense of his graduate studies, he comes to learn that “the world of magic is filled with scientists and the world of science is filled with magicians,” and he finds compelling material in the intersection of the two spheres. His work with the blind cardsharp, for instance, yields meaty insights into the “cross-modal plasticity” of the brain, which allows one region to take over the functions of another. Similarly, Stone’s effort to learn the classic three-card monte street hustle (“Keep your eye on the Queen”) leads him to a meditation on the psychology of scams, touching on riverboat gamblers, Bernie Madoff and thermodynamics. “Understand the monte,” Stone tells us, “and you’ll understand not just a great trick, but also the basic architecture of every hustle.”